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I don’t know about you, but I really really like telling people what I think. So when Borrell Associates, one of the world leaders in market research wanted to know what KGHL clients thought, I wanted to pass it on.

Subject: Participate in the Montana Radio client survey and have a chance to win an iPad!

KGHL is partnering with Borrell Associates in a survey of clients to ask about your advertising and marketing plans for 2013.

We invite you to participate in this survey by clicking on the link below:

There are two benefits to you. First, you will have a chance to win an iPad by completing the survey. Second, you can get a copy of the summary report in January to get a look at what your peers are planning and doing.

You can bet I already gave my dimes worth. It takes about 5 minutes if you want to participate. The data is only available in a total form, nothing personally identifiable is ever released.

In this week’s Mighty Marketing lets market to men. Certainly there are a number of women working in Agriculture as well, but marketing to men gets the short straw. Unless its beer commercials.

Elsewhere in this issue

Lonnie Bell’s book is here. KGHL has a special book signing with Lonnie this weekend.

Supporting the FFA students is a big focus for us at KGHL. There’s a special way you can get involved this year and help yourself at the MATE Show too.

Cow prices are up again. And while we can measure everything these days, don’t you think it can get a little crazy.

Plus a little contesting too. Identify “Who Said It” and win a great gift basket from Bill and Mary Kennedy’s Wine Market and Deli on Grand in Billings.

Yellowstone County CommissionerBill Kennedy, Lonnie Bell, the Marines, and a number of other media people will be at the Metra Saturday night in a final Toys for Tots campaign push.

Each week in Mighty Marketing, I try and bring you something interesting to read about marketing your business. Let me know what you like and don’t like. Helping you be successful is the challenge we want to solve at KGHL.

When advertising to men, or any other demographic, it’s important to first decide what it is that makes that group tick. Do they like to feel cool? Dangerous? Sexy? Freaky? The list goes on, but when marketing to men, you have to really hone in on the core values. This is particularly important when marketing to men because men are such a diverse and massive segment of the population. Marketing to men relies on broad, universal values that most men hold.

What is the best emotional driver to use when advertising to men? Revenge, ingenuity, and a little bit of dominance sprinkled in. When advertising to men, these two feelings are some of the strongest you can use to really appeal to them. So let’s take a look at these two feelings individually.

Advertising to Men Using Revenge

When marketing to men, it’s important to understand that most men feel very controlled and pushed-around by their wives and girlfriends. So the best ads for advertising to men always open with a man being harried by his wife. They show all of the frustration and anguish that being browbeaten causes, and then they move into the payback phase. When marketing to men, the best advertisers always show a man getting the one-up on his wife or girlfriend, but does so while demonstrating the cool features of the product.

At this rate, it won’t be long until a company comes along to offer multi-media rankings for the neighborhood cats.

All of this measuring raises the question of whether there is anything useful about all these studies and metrics. Does it matter that Bears fans are more “engaged” than Giants fans? Is it helpful to know that Clarence Thomas ranks #3 for web presence even though he’s regarded as sub-par jurist?

According to PeekYou CEO Michael Hussey, the point of the company is to “explore the web from a people perspective” and to show their media influence.

While some of these stats are no doubt useful to marketers, it remains to be seen if media/social media rankings will grow into a useful science or if they’re just a fad to feed our insatiable craving for rankings.

National FFA Week is only 8 weeks away! That sentence alone sends fear through me as KGHL is probably the biggest media supporter of FFA in all of Montana. The Mighty 790 is working with FFA classes in the 20 county area, to do something extra special in honor of the week at this year’s MATE show.

I’m pretty sure no radio station has ever combined with the FFA this way.

If you’d like to show your company’s support of the students of the FFA, contact Karen.

Who Said It?

I would rather be judged by 12 farmers than 12 scholars (Quotation)

You can win a great gift basket from the Mary and Bill Kennedy’s Wine Market and Deli by answering correctly. Click here to give your answer.

It’s a great time to be in agriculture or selling products to Ag producers.

Cull cow prices will set another annual record high in 2012. Record highs are not that unusual, because records were also attained in 2010 and 2011. Cow prices were lower in 2009 due to the severe U.S. recession which negatively impacted most agricultural prices. Higher cow prices in 2012 are the result of lower cow slaughter and strong demand for 90% lean, boneless beef. Cow slaughter will be down about 4.5% from last year in spite of very dry conditions throughout much of the country. USDA-NASS released the last U.S. range and pasture condition report of the season at the end of October, which showed 54% of ranges and pastures in poor and very poor condition. That compares to 41% poor and very poor last year and 30% for the previous 5-year average.

Did you ever have something so exciting getting ready to happen that you just could NOT hold it in?

At KGHL, we’ve been busy improving our station from the amount of ag programming, through technical upgrades to our signal and operation, and providing a great platform to reach ag producers everyday. Next week, KGHL will have a major announcement that will positively affect our on air product and your marketing.

National FFA Week (Feburary 18-22)comes right after the MATE show(February 14-16). KGHL has partnered with area FFA chapters to put together a one of a kind premium item for MATE Show. It will celebrate the FFA and student contributions. Karen Gallagher can tell you how your business can get involved.

How popular is KGHL’s Lonnie Bell? His recently released autobiography SOLD OUT of its first printing in 17 days. It was all in person or by phone purchases. Nothing was sold online. Old school marketing at its best.

In this week’s Mighty Marketing, there’s a story about lawyers marketing that will apply to you, evaluating your Facebook page (I think that’s a new cottage growth industry for selling to the unaware), a quick step into the math of audience estimates, and finally an “infographic” on the real valuation of cable TV inserts.

Each week, I publish a few of the marketing ideas I run across while thinking of ways to maintain or grow your business. I hope you find them useful.

A Tale of Two Lawyersby Roy H. WilliamsI recently spent a day with two lawyers who practice the same legal specialty. We’ll call them Nick and Ralph. They live on opposite sides of the country. They met at a conference and became friends.

Nick decided to go fishing for customers with a net. He put his money in radio.

Ralph thought it made more sense to target only those people in immediate need of a lawyer within his specialty. Ralph went fishing with a hook called Pay-Per-Click.

Ralph said, “Nick, you’re hunting with a shotgun. I’m hunting with a rifle.” Ralph believes in targeting, you see. That’s why he fishes with a hook and catches just one fish at a time. But you don’t build a widespread reputation by waiting until your customer needs you and then targeting them through Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click.

Nick the Net chose to win the public before they needed his services. Nick the Net wanted everyone in the city to know about him, even if many of them would never need his services. Nick the Net chose to win the hearts of the people 52 weeks a year.

Both men are smart and aggressive. They plunged. Hard.

Ralph the Hook spends $180,000 per month on Search Engine Optimization, online marketing consultants, and locally targeted Pay-Per-Click. His annual ad budget of $2,160,000 brings in slightly less than $6 million per year in legal fees, leaving Ralph with a little less than $4 million for gas money. Not bad.

Nick the Net spent $30,000 per month on radio. His $360,000 ad budget brought in $4.2 million in legal fees, leaving Nick with a little more than $3.8 million to spend on lunch.

NOTE: Nick brought in almost as much money but spent only 1/6 as much on ads.

When you advertise 52 weeks a year on the radio, you become a household word. Yours is the name the customer thinks of first and feels the best about. The leads brought in through radio are much warmer than the leads generated through pay-per-click.

Ralph the Hook still believes that “targeting the right customer” is the secret to growing a business.

But Nick and I believe in building a widespread reputation with a warm predisposition in the hearts of the general, untargeted public.

Which do you believe?

Common sense says targeting would be more efficient, right?

My thirty years of experience say otherwise.

How are you doing on Facebook?Have you ever wondered if what you’re doing on Facebook is right or not? Here’s a simple checklist to properly evaluate your Facebook Page and see if you’re on the right track.

Facebook Page Checklist:

“About” section: is your website URL the first thing listed?

Additional “About” section: Are you providing links to your company’s other social channels, like your Twitter account and blog?

Cover photo: is it well-designed and does it meet Facebook’s Guidelines?

Cover photo description: when someone clicks on your cover photo, do you have a photo description with information, a call to action, or links?

Profile photo: does it clearly reflect your brand?

App thumbnails: are the three most important apps featured as “favorite” apps, and do the app thumbnails include a call to action or have a promising label?

“Talking about this number”: Divide your “Talking about this number” by your Page’s total number of Likes. This will calculate your Page’s engagement from the past seven days. Average Page engagement is two percent. If you’re below two percent, your content strategy needs to be adjusted.

Content strategy:

What type of content is your business sharing?
Are you using a photo or another type of media to accompany each status update?
Are you sharing valuable, relevant information with your fans?
Are you implementing the 70/20/10 rule?
Does your content speak directly to your target audience?

Branding: What does your brand say about the users who like your Page? Remember: people Like a Facebook Page not because they like a particular product or service, they do it because what they Like says something about their own identity.

Commenting: Are you engaging back with your Facebook fans? You should be Liking their comments and responding to all their questions.

National FFA Week and the MATE Show

National FFA Week is only 5 weeks away! That sentence alone sends fear through me as KGHL is probably the biggest media supporter of FFA in all of Montana. The Mighty 790 is working with FFA classes in the 20 county area, to do something extra special in honor of the week at this year’s MATE show.

KGHL is publishing a Salute to FFA newspaper to be given to all the attendees of the MATE Show. The paper features articles from FFA students, contacts for FFA chapters across our 20 county area, and salutes the role FFA plays in setting the table for tomorrow.

If you’d like to show your company’s support of the students of the FFA, contact Karen.

* Billings Arbitron ratings are released for market subscribers ONLY January 25. An average of 21 Yellowstone County households per week fully participate in developing ratings for our market.

Retail 2012: An NAA Analysis

The U.S. retail environment continues to transform as it faces both new and persistent challenges to growing, in particular, the brick-and-mortar business. Of the top 50 newspaper retail advertisers measured by Kantar Media, only nine saw sales growth from 2008 to 2011. To help newspapers better understand the retail landscape and issues facing specific retailers, NAA has assembled data and analysis on retail trends. You need to be a NAA subscriber to read the data.

A May 2012 report authored by the IAB and Ipsos MediaCT, which drew on data from three surveys of US consumers, found that internet-enabled devices were not displacing other media-related activities, but adding to them. According to the Ipsos MediaCT LMX survey, the average amount of time that respondents spent engaging with media each day climbed to 9.6 hours in 2011, from 9 hours in 2009. Time spent online or on a computer jumped to 3.1 hours from 2.5 hours over the same period. But the amount of time respondents spent watching TV held steady, at 3.4 hours. Radio was at 1.5 hours. Reading of all kinds was down to 42 minutes a day. eMarketer estimates that US adults spent an average of about 11.5 hours per day consuming media content in 2011. Read the rest at emarketer.

Last week, I promised you we had a big announcement that will positively affect the programming of KGHL and your marketing with the station.

Beginning February 4, KGHL is adding another big name air talent to our staff to go along with Karen Gallagher and Nick Tyler. This talent will be our new afternoon host.

The agreement is done and everyone has shaken hands. But Taylor is in Helena this week and all he would let me do until the paper is signed is give hints. I hope they are big enough. By the way, Tonya, you are NOT eligible to guess.

KGHL has hired a big name local air talent to host afternoons beginning February 4.

This talent has done practically every air shift on radio but is known for their work outside radio.

They have been on air on the Mighty 790 KGHL.

They are one of only two people in town who are certified in this area.

Daddy played bass might be a good clue too

Send your guesses to me. I’ll pick a random winner of a $50 gift card to the restaurant of your choice to the winner.

The Billings Chamber Ag Banquet is Friday. If you want to go hang out and have a great dinner at the Holiday Inn, please let Karen or me know. In this week’s Mighty Marketing, ad avoidance is a big problem in many attempts to market today. A new study shows what media does the best job at delivering your message. Billings market ratings are delivered in a few days, which means the spin doctors will be at work. Nielsen has a study on how mobile phones are used-mobile advertising is NOT one of the uses. And I love infographics. This week, a great study from Ad Age on how people use media based on their age group and time of day. If you work in, sell, or buy newspapers, I’d sit down before I look at this comprehensive study.

Each week, I publish a few of the marketing ideas I run across while thinking of ways to maintain or grow your business. I hope you find them useful.

First imperative of advertising, regardless of medium: Advertisers want their messages to be received, not bypassed. And nobody does it better than Radio.

NuVoodoo’s national studies of radio listeners 18-54 tell the story. These days, getting the consumer to the message is an advantage that Radio has over all other mass media. Ironically, we fight the perception that too many listeners tend to punch out commercials. And thus, that too few may actually receive that message, especially when placed late in a stopset. In reality, of course, virtually every mass advertising medium today allows consumers some opportunity to bypass the advertising.

“For over six months, we’ve been saying that the fiscal cliff and economic uncertainty could impact holiday sales,” Shay said. “As the number shows, these issues had a visible impact on consumer spending this holiday season.”

OR

Online and offline sales rose during the 2012 holiday season, but fell short of National Retail Federation’s preseason predictions.

Holiday sales missed their target by $150 Billion dollars according to figures released by the National Retail Foundation in New York. Total retail sales for the holiday was $424 Billion dollars, well off the NRF projection.

Online holiday sales missed their growth target by nearly 10% in the period. The NRF had forecast a growth of 12% in online retail sales.

“For over six months, we’ve been saying that the fiscal cliff and economic uncertainty could impact holiday sales,” Shay said. “As the number shows, these issues had a visible impact on consumer spending this holiday season.”

As my “John Houseman” like professor drilled into me, there are multiple sides to a story.

National FFA Week and the MATE Show

National FFA Week is only 4 weeks away! That sentence alone sends fear through me as KGHL is probably the biggest media supporter of FFA in all of Montana. The Mighty 790 is working with FFA classes in the 20 county area, to do something extra special in honor of the week at this year’s MATE show.

KGHL is publishing a Salute to FFA newspaper to be given to all the attendees of the MATE Show. The paper features articles from FFA students, contacts for FFA chapters across our 20 county area, and salutes the role FFA plays in setting the table for tomorrow.

If you’d like to show your company’s support of the students of the FFA, contact Karen.

Nielsen has released a new report [download page] containing a range of figures related to how US consumers use different forms of media and devices. Among them, a breakdown of the top 8 activities performed on mobiles, by function.

The top activity, texting, occupies 14.1% of consumers’ mobile time. Coupled with the 5.3% devoted to email and instant messaging, that means that about 1 in every 5 minutes spent on a mobile phone is spent messaging in some form. The next biggest category? Social networking, which occupies 10.2% of mobile time.

As you look through the information on the graphic from industry publication Advertising Age, two things jump out. One is the usage of radio across almost all demographic cells. Second is the low use of print.

Have you ever done business with your company as a customer? Think Undercover Boss with a twist. The show focuses on what happens when the boss is behind the scenes. What would the show be like if the boss was the client? How would KOA CEO Jim Rogers have fared checking into a kampground?

We all know our businesses (and hopefully our clients and customers) better than anyone. Or so we think.

Last week, I wrote about big changes and a big name talent coming to KGHL February 4. My hints were very vague and directed at what I thought was important. What is more important is what the hiring of this talent will mean to you and your business. I thought I’d try a few bigger hints and use them to show you what this change means to your business with KGHL.

Our talent is recognized as much for their face as their voice. (Cellular Plus)

A segment of a program they do now has become a catch phrase on his current station

One of only two meteorologists in media in Billings today

Hosted morning radio on several stations in town in the past

Is a very experienced marketing and advertising person with more than 20 years in Billings

The instant recognizability and credibility this talent brings to KGHL will be good in helping your business be more successful by getting your message in an even better place. If you know who it is, show off your sleuthing skills here.

In this week’s Mighty Marketing, something I wrote was picked up by a #1 best selling business author who wrote a blog about it–The Echo Chamber of Marketing. That was exciting. There’s also a report on the Chamber Ag Banquet, an article on ROI in radio and how KGHL works differently. Plus an attitude adjustment idea, and an infographic on bad hires and their cost.

Each week, I publish a few of the marketing ideas I run across while thinking of ways to maintain or grow your business. I hope you find them useful.

Ag Banquet Like Agriculture–A Record Setting Year
by Kama Humphrey

The 16th Billings Chamber Ag Banquet set a record attendance last Friday night with 816 in the audience. The event, at the Holiday Inn Grand Montana, featured the Cold Hard Cash Band and a number of awards and fun.

Q2’s Ed McIntosh and Northern Ag Network’s Russell Nemetz ran the show Friday night with tons of door prizes. (Couldn’t tell be me, our table only won once). Huntley Project FFA students collected more than $2000 in the 50-50 drawing during the evening.

The purpose of the annual Ag banquet is to honor those in Montana’s biggest industry, Agriculutre. The night also featured the presentation of the Roche Juane Agriculture Excellence Award. Dan Downs of Montana Seed and Grain was the 2012 winner. His son accepted on behalf of the family. Dan was killed in a car accident in December.

Funds raised during the Ag Banquet go right back into community service. The Chamber Ag Committee uses the funds for Pancake Breakfasts year around at events like FFA meeting and the Montana Stockgrowers Assocation.

As advertisers begin to look beyond ratings to effectiveness – how should radio stations operate?

That’s the question put to Dave Ramsey, host of the nationally syndicated Dave Ramsey Show, which is heard on more than 500 radio stations throughout the US and Canada. Dave’s also an author, television host, and speaker.

Dave, on a conference call with your affiliates recently you noted that the nature of business, both for your company and for your broadcast affiliates, is transitioning from more transactional business to relational business. We know what “transactional” means but what do you mean by “relational?”

The marketplace has tightened up with the economy slowing down and people are scared, they’re paralyzed, or at least they’re very, very careful. The only way that they are able and willing to emotionally invest in something like radio advertising is they have to have a high level of trust.

Radio is not a commodity that you sell on volume based on points and numbers and ratings and so forth. You have to sit down with the business owner and explain to them that when they put in X dollars, they’re going to get a return on investment of Y and this is why our radio format and our reach is going to work for you.

And then you have to babysit them and hold their hands and actually cause them to do business with you in a way that they are happy they did – meaning advertising that works and is “free” because it makes you more than it costs you.

It’s our job in the radio business.

What do you say to the broadcaster who says “Well I understand how Google can provide ROI but how do I, a radio station – where the message goes out into the ether – how can I provide that kind of accountability and that kind of relational response from advertisers?

Try putting your customer shoes on and walking around in them a little bit. If you’re a guy that owns a heating and air business and you’re going to buy advertising on a radio station you need your phone to ring, you need to sell some heating and air units, you need to sell some service plans, there needs to be a response to this. If I’m in the radio business my job is to make that small business guy successful. I’ve got to make him win.

My job is to visit their store and actually put some effort into the copy points and try to think like their customer thinks, understand what the demographics of their customers are, not just sell them an ad and then wonder why it didn’t work and then go sell somebody else an ad and then wonder why it didn’t work, either. That’s so transactional and it’s such short-term thinking.

The fun thing about doing sales right is you don’t have to do them over and over.

The good news when you do servant-type selling (where you see your client as someone you’re supposed to be serving) you’re not there to twist their arms, you’re not there to manipulate them, you’re not there to put some technique on them, I really want to find out how I can help you – my client – win.

We’ve got people advertising on the Dave Ramsey Show who have been with us for 20 years and are still advertising. We don’t sell my show on rating points. We sell it on results. We sell it on relationships. I don’t have a single client advertising with me who even know what my ratings are. They don’t give a rip. All they know is that advertising on my show has changed their lives.

KGHL is publishing a Salute to FFA newspaper to be given to all the attendees of the MATE Show. The paper features articles from FFA students, contacts for FFA chapters across our 20 county area, and salutes the role FFA plays in setting the table for tomorrow.

Because print takes longer to produce than radio, the deadline for joining us to salute the FFA kids is Friday!

If you’d like to show your company’s support of the students of the FFA, contact Karen.

While the numbers may be out of whack for what a bad hire would cost in the Billings area, the general idea of the damage is still the same. The estimator is focused on what a General Sales Manager or a sales leader gone bad might cost you.

For a while now, you have heard us say KGHL is a different radio station today. You may know Taylor and Shannon Brown bought the station at the start of 2011. Much like what you have been seeing with Mike and Chris Nelson’s efforts at rebuilding the Northern Hotel, KGHL needed a similar remodel. We also needed to stay on the air while we remodeled.

A lot of that work has been behind the scenes to create a better radio station for our listeners and in turn our advertisers. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have gone into transmission and studio projects. Today, I get to tell you the next big step.

Ed McIntosh joins KGHL to do the afternoon show next week. The new show will bring the popular TV feature “Ag and Weather Together” from Q2 to KGHL. Ed’s show will feature lots of conversation and information about events and activities in the 20 county area. KGHL will also have Billings only live, local radio news information show at 5pm every day. Ed will also pair with the legendary Lonnie Bell on Sunday mornings.

The “new” KGHL starts February 3.

Ratings information was released for the Billings market recently, both in television and radio. KGHL isn’t a subscriber to the data so you won’t hear us quote a number (besides a number never bought anything). The thing that I found most amazing had to do with another legacy media, print. The Audit Bureau of Circulation is quoted in the market report showing another drastic decline for the local paper. That’s consistent with everything we know but the amount of advertising that gets placed. “Got to be in the paper,” is less true today that ever before.

In this week’s Mighty Marketing, I had a client this week who was truly overwhlemed at the number of marketing choices he could make. This article sheds some light on that idea. Social media and internet marketing gets a lot of buzz, but how many farmers and ranchers have Facebook pages? There’s a great view of agriculture from legendary investor Jim Rogers, an idea that the quality of your product DOES NOT MATTER, and a related story on how to approach the “invisible” solution.

Each week, I publish a few of the marketing ideas I run across while thinking of ways to maintain or grow your business. I hope you find them useful.

Are You Scared to Lose?
by Mike Brunel

In a recent interview of a sports coach, he was lamenting the loss of a senior player to another sporting franchise, while appearing upbeat; his body language said a lot more. I noticed something on the white board directly behind him, in the camera line. Three words.

“Scared to lose’.

I wondered why this statement was up there. I think I know why it was there, given the track record of this sporting team, but it got me thinking, how many times are we are scared to lose?

Set up better language

In sport especially, I know that coaches, the great ones, set up their players to succeed not fail.

I recall a conversation with a coach of a team that trained kickers. He was able to train across all sports either in NFL, soccer, rugby, AFL and rugby league. His process was to set up in a kickers mind, the reward for success not the fear of failure.

Often when he trained new kickers, he discovered that what went on in their mind was failure.

“What if I don’t get this kick what will happen? Or if I miss this kick, I am going to let down my team, my team mates, and my family, everyone.” It sets the kicker up to fail.

Change your internal dialogue

So, what does this coach do? He changes the internal language; he says to his rookies, “What’s the reward for getting this kick over? Or in the goal? Or through the goalposts?

He says to them “ Imagine it going over and you seeing the smile on your teammate’s faces, your family being so proud. Think about the reward for success. What’s the reward for you when this kick goes over?”

Measure, then Manage

Then he tracks their stats, how many kicks attempted, how many go over? how many go in? How we can improve? What technique can we work on? All questions so he and the kicker can measure themselves.

Facebook’s Reach to Farmers and Ranchers

It is a little hard to read clearly in the e-mail format. The jist of the photo shows the number of people within 50 miles of Billings whose Facebook page shows interests in Farming, Agriculture, and Cattle. The total was 160. That’s real micro targeting.

I think there are a few more people within 50 miles of town in the ag business.

Why My Money is in Agriculture

A perspective from the national level: Jim Rogers, investor and author

Jim Rogers is bullish on agricultural commodities and farmland, and his fascination with both brought him to Greater Des Moines last week to be the keynote speaker at Peoples Co.’s Land Expo. The expo is an annual extravaganza that draws bankers, farmers, developers, land brokers and investors. Rogers earned a reputation in the 1970s as an investment wizard. Now 70, and living in Singapore, he founded the Quantum Fund with partner George Soros in 1973 and watched its value increase 4,200 percent over the next 10 years. As a result, Rogers retired in 1980 at age 38. He stays busy as an author, frequent commentator on a variety of investment issues, and university lecturer. He also rode a motorcycle around the world on two occasions after retiring. His experiences during one trip were recounted in the book “Investment Biker.”

What makes farmland an attractive investment?

All farmland is attractive since agriculture is now going to thrive for a couple of decades – partly because ag has been a disaster for 30 years.

What would reverse the appreciation in land values?

Land prices will have periods of consolidation, but they will be mainly in times of ag product price declines, which will be fewer and less deep in the future. Bad laws such as exchange controls and forbidding foreigners buying land in the United States will also hurt. These two could kill the markets in the United States when they come, but there is a lot of farmland outside the United States in nations more friendly to capital and capitalism.

What other investments, asset classes are drawing your attention?

Mainly all agriculture products. That is the place to be.

Marketing Defined

Marketing is not a battle of products. Marketing is a battle of perceptions! There are no “best products”. All that exists in the world of marketing are perceptions in the minds of consumers. THE PERCEPTION IS THE REALITY. Marketing is the process of dealing with those perceptions.

Invisible Radio Advertising

Last week, I spent hours walking the endless exhibit space at the Consumer Electronics Show. For every WOW innovation there were a hundred yawners. Countless “Me, Too” products that made you wonder why someone ponied up money for exhibit space in the first place.

After the show, I took an offsite meeting with a business prospect in an oversaturated radio category. When I asked, “What’s the one thing that makes your service different?” I was told, “Nothing. We’re exactly like everyone else in the space.”

A marketer’s worst nightmare, right? No Unique Selling Proposition. No proprietary offer or incentive. Nor any hint of interest at suggesting any kind of differentiation. In fact, the opposite was encouraged, as if our media buying magic wand would make their campaign instantly profitable in an already-overcrowded marketplace.

This is where the need for real creativity in radio advertising kicks in. How do you take a played-out message to market and still deliver results?

Often times, the path is blazed or razed in the first few seconds of the radio commercial, when listeners decide whether or not to pay attention to the rest of the message.

What is the very first thing your prospect will hear? A question? A challenge? A traffic-stopping statement? Music? A sound effect?

And who will deliver that message? A man? A woman? A child? A trusted friend? An authoritarian figure? Will it be one voice? Two voices? A chorus? A talking gecko?

Will the message be delivered as a monolog? In dialogue? Via a musical jingle? In rhyme or rap? A cadence-bending mashup of sound and speech that will command attention and inspire recall?

Happily, these infinite options present endless ways to take “the same old message” and make it memorable. “Copy smart” is good. “Smart copy” with an ear-grabbing twist is better.

But there’s a fine line to walk between creative that motivates and creative that simply entertains. The former justifies your investment and returns profitable revenue. The latter kills campaigns, leaving otherwise successful marketers to ponder why their competitors are still on the air when, clearly, “radio doesn’t work.”

Craft your message in such a way that it gets noticed and remembered. There’s no shortage of ideas, only the need to choose wisely and create a system that helps you identify and optimize what works.